On Wednesday, April 01, 2026 09:37:46 PM Lenny Andreu wrote: > As other have stated, a database (SQL) tends to be complex in nature, for > anything simple, maybe keep text based files, like CSV or recutils.
I'm not the OP, but thanks for mentioning recutils as it is something I had never come across (and might look into deeper at some point). This is going to sound crazy, but fwiw, I'll mention that since shortly after 2000 (maybe 2002?) I started using mbox files as a free format database. (I was an immigrant from Windows around that time and I was looking for a replacement for AskSam and ZyIndex. (At the time, I couldn't find anything else to meet the need -- I guess since there may be better(?) choices (or there may have been choices which I didn't find at the time.) I could say more, and if anyone is interested (which I don't really expect), I will say more. I'll just mention that I normally create "records" in a text editor (currently kate), but I can also create or read "records" with any email client which handles mbox files, and I can index the entire "database" using tools like recoll. I also use variations of the TWiki / foswiki markup language to mark things like headers (and things like bold, italic, ...). (I use that markup so I can easily transfer records into a (my) TWiki (named WikiLearn). Kate is also set up (with a .xml file) to do things like fold text under headers (and some day, fold other constructs (e.g., citations)).
